Centers and Institutes

Created in 1983 as one of the State of New York's 4 original Centers for Advanced Technology, CATT continues to fulfill its mission to stimulate economic development in information technology through research and education.

Companies that partner with CATT in joint research gain access to state-of-the-art facilities and a team of experts who understand how to turn technological breakthroughs into commercially-viable products and services. CATT’s research program focuses on 3 key areas that are crucial to the needs of businesses today:

Connected Cities for Smart Mobility towards Accessible and Resilient Transportation (C2SMART) is a U.S. Department of Transportation Tier 1 University Transportation Center (UTC) for research, education, workforce development, and technology transfer activities. The main research priority of this solution-oriented center is “Mobility of People and Goods in Urban Areas” with a focus on “Smart and Connected Cities.” Rather than just focusing on developing technologies to make a city smarter, C2SMART is dedicated to a related critical step: how to connect these disparate technologies with cities of different population and infrastructure scales and different systems of systems. The NYU Tandon-led UTC includes University of Washington at Seattle, University of Texas El Paso, Rutgers University, and City University of New York, which explore and field-test innovations in their home cities.

At no other time in history has innovation brought about more challenges and opportunities for government. The Governance Lab (the GovLab) at NYU Tandon School of Engineering studies the impact of technology on governing. This "think" and "do" tank partners with public institutions to design, implement and assess innovative ways of using technology to advance more effective and legitimate governing. Our goal is to strengthen the ability of public institutions — including but not limited to governments — and people to work more transparently and collaboratively to make better decisions, solve public problems, and advance social justice.

The GovLab's team has advocated for and designed open data policies and platforms and studied the impact of open data globally. We have done pathbreaking work to advance public-private big data partnerships, known as data collaboratives, with such partners as UNICEF, designed and studied how expert networks can improve how federal agencies issue patents or examine medical devices, and pioneered the use of "smarter crowdsourcing" to tackle problems such as Zika in Brazil or corruption in Mexico. The GovLab coordinates the MacArthur Foundation funded Research Network on Opening Governance. The GovLab also trains NYU students and professionals in government and civil society in public entrepreneurship — learning to pioneer and implement innovative approaches to tackling societal problems to the end of improving people's lives.

The NYU Center for Cybersecurity (CCS) is an interdisciplinary research institute dedicated to training the next generation of cyber security professionals and to shaping the public discourse and policy landscape on issues of technology and security. The Center is a collaboration among NYU School of Law, NYU Tandon School of Engineering, the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and other NYU schools and departments. The Center has physical locations in New York City and at NYU’s campus in Abu Dhabi, as well as a network of scholars and practitioners in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and North America.

The world’s first academic research center combining Wireless, Computing, and Medical Applications

NYU and the School of Engineering have created several new faculty positions, have invested $3.5 Million in funding, and are providing an additional $4 Million in world-class research space upgrades to form a new center of excellence, NYU WIRELESS, the first academic center of its kind in the world. NYU WIRELESS is an interdisciplinary research center that is equipped to develop revolutionary circuits and systems for several business sectors, including the wireless industry, the distributed computing and data center industry, and the medical profession. NYU WIRELESS brings together faculty and students with expertise in millimeter wave wireless communications and circuits, distributed networking and computing, and many branches of medicine. Just launched this year, already there are 24 faculty and 100 graduate and undergraduate students participating in this new interdisciplinary center.

NYU WIRELESS conducts about $10 million/year in funded research, and allows its industrial affiliates to maximize the value of their investment by leveraging industrial affiliates funds with large NSF, NIH, and other competitive research programs. NYU WIRELESS affiliates enjoy close and frequent interaction with the center’s faculty and students, who come from the School of Engineering's Electrical and Computer engineering department, NYU’s Courant Computer Science department, and many different branches of NYU’s Langone School of Medicine.